


Penitence

by BetweenTownleys



Category: Grand Theft Auto V
Genre: M/M, Trevor pines for the past, explicit things everywhere, gross garbage language, north yankton flashbacks
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-06-20
Updated: 2014-11-13
Packaged: 2018-02-05 11:54:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 17,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1817590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BetweenTownleys/pseuds/BetweenTownleys
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The line between love and hate quivers dangerously as Trevor drags himself though old memories.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Trevor is total trash. This story contains lots of offensive and potentially triggering things like harsh language, mentions of incest, molestation, blood, gore, poop, drug abuse, bestiality and all kinds of other stuff Trevor is all about. So WATCH OUT! …For that. If that doesn’t bother you, welcome to this disgusting trikey romance, you sick fuck. This is part 1 of a bunch of chapters, so get your boners ready! OK, thanks.

 

As with most things in Trevor's life, it was undeniable that he was in this situation dick-deep.

In this particular case, it happened to be a literal interpretation. (Another common occurrence.) With the dragging groan of a tortured sow, the meth-addled reprobate released his load into the shivering juggalo beneath him. Bright white lights flashed like fire, then were gone. For long moments afterward Trevor stiffly kneaded the bony hips under his hands, eyelids clenched tight, his softening cock pulsing unsympathetically as it slid out from the battered hole. Wetness registered across his thighs, and the lowlife at length cracked an eye open. Between Trevor's palms was about what he had expected… glorious carnage. The angry red swell of abused meat and, of course, his own greasy baby batter. It was… everywhere. Fuck. When had that happened? Sometime between fucking on the kitchen counter, and fucking on the table by the busted television? (Or was it when they were UNDER the table? There was cum on the floorboards.) _But back to the ass in his hands_. That was what was important, here. It radiated heat like a goddamn coal furnace. Most _likely_ because it was a _nasty slurry of maltreated human garbage_. Kinda sticky. Definitely messy… and..? Yep, bloody. Shit. No going back into that hole anytime in the next 20 minutes.

And then the other thing registered; the thing Trevor hated most. The muffled whimpers of Wade Hebert as he bit into the couch like some little baby bitch. He was crying. Or at least TRYING not to cry. And failing. Again.

"For FUCKSAKE, Wade!" the balding man growled, shoving the other body forcefully away from himself. "WHAT did I tell you about the goddamn crying?!?"

Trevor couldn't tolerate the blubbering which always seemed to come hand-in-hand with the aftermath of enjoying what at one point had been a reasonably average heterosexual human poop chute. This one, though resilient enough by his usual standards, suddenly seemed to Trevor as if it had seen better days. Or was that kinder days? It didn't matter in the long run, considering Trevor Philips fucked whatever the fuck Trevor Philips wanted to fuck, WHEN he wanted to fuck it. But even some assholes had their limits.

"…sorry Trevor," the quivering boy groveled, meekly peeking over his shoulder with a ruddy face. "you… you ain't gonna make me do that dance again, is you?"

A murderous look silenced Wade and the boy clambered up off the couch and onto shaky legs, before he shuffled away awkwardly for the bathroom. Trevor watched him cross the floor of his trailer, already feeling the familiar ache again in the pit of his balls. Slowly, it coiled like a snake.  

Trevor Philips was angry. And he was horny. GOD, FUCK, was he horny. But mostly he was angry. Obviously the meth did it's fair share in the hearty encouragement of these things, but Trevor liked to reason that if he'd been living the saintly life of a monk in a pastoral farming monastery, he STILL would have been angry and horny enough right now to fuck a good third of the livestock to death. It wasn't a bad fantasy to entertain. Actually, sometimes he entertained the thought of fucking animals to death when he was alone in the morning. Or when he was watching Ashley getting hammered in the ass by her faggot biker boyfriend. Or when a stoplight was taking too long.

But… It was just…. the thing was….

….it just…

It hurt. It hurt.

What? But, what was that? What, exactly, hurt?? A preposterous line of queries, repeat offenders Trevor mulled over every time he caught a glance of his mildewing face in the back of a spoon, a car window, a pool of blood.

The answer was simple. And yet… too…. _fucking…._ COMPLEX…. for even Trevor's mental aptitudes to really fully encompass, despite how smart he tried to convince himself he actually was. It was just… Everything.

Everything hurt. 

Everything??? But how could EVERYTHING hurt? The middle-aged man keened the same lonely questions over again to himself, and ran a callused hand up over his bald spot to wipe some of the sweat away. Over the past few months, the thoughts had been dogging him constantly. More than they ever had. It was absurd. _'Everything'_ covered a fucking TON of subject material, after all.

  _Everything_ was the first cup of coffee in the morning. It was the hard flat pack of his fist making contact with flesh. It was orgasms, and pissing on daffodils and burning a hole in your pants after falling asleep with a cigarette dangling on your lip. It was twitching out and huffing gasoline and vomiting blood. It was model airplanes. It was being 30,000 feet in the air on a clear blue day. But it _did_ hurt. Maybe not every time, but always sometimes. Everything. Trevor knew, from the tips of his toes to the top of his skull. He just… fucking… KNEW. That nothing in his life was ever gonna be right again. COULD NEVER be right again.

 

Not since Yankton. Not when it had been so right before. And now it wasn't. _la_ _vie dure._

 

The couch under his fingers felt wet with grease and dirt. Trevor regarded his naked thighs with a dead stare, noting the green tinge his skin took under the neon sign hung above his fridge. His teeth hurt. A feverish glance brought the ex-pilot's eyes up to scour the room. The bowl was there, on the floor beneath the counter, and yet somehow unbroken. A bag of crystal laid several feet away, upturned but sealed in a plastic ziplock bag. Trevor had no memory of shoving it off the counter, but immediately understood that he must have done so. He would hit Wade about it later. A fine sheen of sweat broke out across his palms as he crouched forward.

Sure, there had been plenty of time between North Yankton and now. Nine years, actually. But it had been nine years of dwelling. Nine years of playing the _bitter widow_. He'd tried to move on. The time had even given him a few opportunities… starting his little family and seeding thoughts for his enterprise, for example. And time for other things. To periodically go back up north and stomp around in the snowy mud and piss on tombstones in the graveyard he hated so much, to pretend it was because he was only furious. Anger he could use now to blow fire on anyone who came too close. And time even after that to develop a truly _righteous_ drug regiment to fill up all the leftover empty spaces. Not too shabby, all around. The only problem was, when you bury enough corpses in the same area, eventually you start digging up old ones.

A crumpled letter from Brad sat shoved to the far end of the counter, weighted down by a figurine of Impotent Rage. It had too many words like _'back then'_ and ' _I wish'_ or _'do you remember'_ for Trevor to stomach reading it again.

So it hurt. Everything. And on nights like this one, sometimes it felt like there was barely a point in holding anything together at all.

Barely. 

"You got any morea that, uh, gosh, I guess dish soap?"

Wade's lisp sounded through the muffled bathroom door just as Trevor hit the bowl in his hand. He slowly let out an acrid white breath as he pictured the expendable juggalo scooping cum out of his now cavernous back entrance. He chose not to reply, instead leering off into the distance as a surge of vibratory anger prickled his flesh with goosebumps. On a second impulse, he set the bowl down and leaned back against his couch. A dirty hand ran up beneath the grubby white shirt he wore, pausing to flick over the nub of his left nipple. Miserable and naked from the waist down, Trevor ground his teeth together and relented to the inevitable hunger focused in and around the area of his cock. With a frustrated snarl, he wrapped his fingers around its rock-solid mass and started pumping.

"Didja hear what I- oh," Wade's face went from blank to crestfallen as he peered back out into the main part of the trailer. "Heck, Trevor, you got more wood than a forest fulla dang trees!"

"Get over here, princess," the criminal grit through a clamped jaw. "God didn't give you a tongue so you could fucking _talk to me_ with it!"

A look of trepidation crossed Wade's face, even as he took a halting step forward. "I thought you said we was gonna smoke after we-"

"Oh, _oh,_ _please_ , be my guest!" The suddenly syrupy tone of friendliness should have been a tip-off.

Trevor gestured with the suspicious good manners of a talk show hostess to the bowl sitting on the couch at his side. Wade moved in immediately. When he was in close range, Trevor looped his free hand around the back of Wade's neck and slammed his skull backwards into the wall of the trailer. It left a loud dent, but then again, the trailer certainly had more pressing problems than a few bloody craters. On the ground by Trevor's erection, Wade sat moaning with his head clamped in his hands. Red dribbled through a few of his knuckles.

And then, what was that? Was he crying? Again? 

AGAIN again??

"GOD _DAMN IT_ WADE WHAT DID I SAY TO YOU ABOUT THE _FUCKING_ CRYING?"

"I'm SORRY TREVOR, I'm _soooorrrry_!" the druggie wailed from between his fingers, clearly no longer capable of containing the unquenchable well of tears that now spurt from his face, along with jet streams of blood.

A long, frustrated groan cut across the sound of crying.

"Would you just SHUT UP already!?" Patience finally snapped, Trevor jerked Wade's head forward and roughly pushed him down onto what was now his exceedingly, supremely hard erection. The boy's tears cut off in a sudden _'ulp!'_ of surprise, then, silence.

Then, the slow, resigned sucking noise of someone who knows they have been defeated.

At last, the cruelty in Trevor's hands melted away a little. Instead, after a moment, he smoothed his palm out over the back of Wade's dreadlocks. It was almost tender.

"Hmmmmmm, yeah baby…. _yeahhhh_ … just like that."

 

Wade took the dick down his throat with the resigned dedication of a martyr. His ass was still on fire, blood was trickling down his nose and getting all mixed up with the dick taste, and his right knee felt a pang he assumed was broken glass from under the couch, but he'd had worse. He was used to swallowing things. If it was a cock, a lie, or a tall, icy glass of Faygo, it seemed not to matter. (Secret: Wade preferred the Faygo.)

It was hard to say how many times this exact pattern had repeated itself in the past. However, it was an undeniable fact that with Trevor, his desire to fuck whatever hole Wade currently didn't have his hand over went in ebbs and flows. Sometimes he could go weeks without throwing the juggalo so much as an annoyed side-eye. Occasionally, he would even buy them ice cream, handing the cone over with a disconcertingly fatherly expression of both amusement and love. Wade obviously wondered about it, as far as he was able to do so. He had always assumed that in the end the weird behavior was on account of the fact that Trevor was so smart. Smarter than Ron. Smarter than _a lot_ of folks. And smart people had agendas he was just not ever gonna be able to understand. But Wade never wondered quite as hard about the inconsistencies as when they were in the middle of an act itself. It was _always_ scary, but sometimes, it could be _really_ _confusing_ too. Wade was accustomed to being confused, but Trevor's brand of confusing was an entirely different venue altogether.

With light fingers, Trevor dug beneath Wade's dreadlocks and settled his hand at the nape of his neck, eyes closed, clearly in a distant fantasy. The callused hand felt out the bobbing motions with tense enjoyment. Wade had once made the mistake of attempting to ask a question before Trevor had come, and the black eye he had gotten as a result was bad enough that Ron had complained about it for a week. Yet still, on a different occasion, Wade recalled Trevor's fingers tracing the sides of his face with remarkable delicacy. The hands had moved under to brush his chin, just before the con man had muttered the words _'God, I love you so much'_ in a tone which Wade assumed must have come from watching one-too-many daytime TV soaps. Trevor Philips somehow had the ability to be both tremendously kind, _and_ tremendously cruel.

So. Knowing all this, even a complete moron like Wade knew his chances were at their best if he just dutifully sucked Trevor off without a single word. Uncle Thoroughgood had taught him that. (Or had it been Kush-Chronic?) Anyway, it was a task to which he now applied himself thoroughly.

Something about Trevor recently, though… definitely something with him was a little squirrely. Kinda funny. A little… _off_. The problem was just that in Trevor's case, even being just a little ' _off_ ' could be disastrous. Once, when Trevor was feeling _a little off_ (he'd said, 'Wade, I'm feeling _a little off_ today') he'd gotten a burnt bag of french fries from a Burger Shot then driven a Ford Escape through the front window. But at the moment, Wade just wondered at the gentle hands on the back of his head. He wondered at them, and was briefly thankful that Trevor wearing no pants also meant that Trevor's guns were at least 5 feet away. Small blessings.

 

Soft groans sloughed like loose gravel through the quiet trailer, a low, long bass to Wade's sucking staccato. The dick in his mouth was as hard as granite, and deceptively silky. But when Wade allowed himself a peek of Trevor's sweating face, it gave no hint of the fantasy passing behind his closed eyes. Thick eyebrows drawn together into a serious line, Trevor panted heavily through clenched teeth and parted lips.

"… God, I love you… I fucking _love_ you…." the surprising words revealed themselves unexpectedly yet again, and Wade paused, a momentary glitch, if out of nothing else other than shock. The pause was met with a rough growl, and suddenly Trevor's hands were violent again. Taking hold of Wade's hair in a tight fist, Trevor thrust sharply up into his throat, shoving down simultaneously from above. The boy audibly gagged, his hands flapping uselessly like a baby bird's wings in pathetic protest. A few more thrusts and Wade managed to grip back onto Trevor's knees again. Together they worked like that, Trevor's hips bucking violently up against the head in his grip, and Wade anchoring himself like a ship at port during a storm.

 

Whatever was wrong with Trevor, Wade certainly didn't suspect an explanation would be presented to him plainly. He certainly didn't expect nuggets of knowledge to fall on him like mana while Trevor skull fucked his mouth hole for all it was worth (visa vis their pre established agreement about drugs and the group consumption thereof.) And yet Wade suddenly found himself once again, supposedly, in the right place at the right time. With a final rasping growl Trevor thrust forward and shoved Wade's head harshly into his lap as he came, a single name forcing itself desperately through his clenched teeth.

When Trevor was done, he sat back with a huff which might have been exhaustion, and might have been frustration. Most likely it was a sweaty combination of both, Wade thought as he swallowed what had to be a quart of cum. He grimaced at the taste, but knew better than to spit the load out anywhere he could be seen.

Trevor sighed heavily once, licked his lips a few times, wiped some slime off the side of his thigh, and then finally did a double take at Wade who he realized then was staring at him.

"...What?"

Wade looked stumped. That is to say, he looked more stumped than he usually did on any given day. Mild autism would be a lucky diagnosis for Wade's laundry list of problems. Not to mention that time with the shovel and his ex-step-brother Nelson back in 1997.

"…Well you had said, uh…"

Trevor waited a beat, his legs still hanging wide open. "…What? I said what?"

Did he not realize he'd said that name out loud? A fart-like expression of consternation overtook Wade, and Trevor rolled his eyes.

"What is it? I don't have all fucking day _,_ _débile bouché_ , what the fuck do you want??"

"….uh…" weighing his options in this situation, Wade opted then to listen to the flat lining noise his brain was currently making. In the name of personal safety, he would go with the always-solid reply of total silence.

Another minute was spent staring at each other. Trevor clearly perplexed, snorted once and cuffed Wade across the right ear. "You, my friend, are a waste of human space and resources, let me tell ya."

The man on the couch observed the blood smeared across his favorite toy's face, and the subject shifted again.

"…Does Wadey want an ice-cream?"

Was that even a question?? Was Trevor not mad anymore????? The smile that lit Wade’s face almost completely obliterated the thought he had been perched on the edge of until that moment. But as Trevor moved off, his slick and mercifully limp dick swinging as he went, the question doubled back around one last time.

 

Who the HECK was _Michael_?

 

 

 

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wade wonders about the mysterious Michael. Trevor deals with his guilt using unproductive methods.

 

 

"You uh, know anybody named… uh, _Michael_?" Wade's dulcet question bounced off the back of Ron's head.

The name felt uncomfortable to Wade as it hung in-between them, like a too-tight pair of new underwear. At first Ron appeared to not have heard the words at all.

"… _Michael_?" At last the silence broke. "Michael, Michael… hmmm." The older man chewed on the name, ruminating.

Ron was running his hands along the wall of his small front porch, apparently hunting for something. By this point in their association, it was beyond Wade to question what exactly Ron was searching _for_. Probably for aliens. Or pillbugs. Or microphones, or carbon monoxide or maybe his probably dead ex-wife. Wade had no idea, though Ronald appeared to be operating as a man with a mission. It was high noon in Sandy Shores, and the bucket hat Ron was currently sporting had dropped a dark blue shadow beneath the brim across his face. He looked as focused as he had ever been.

The middle aged man fumbled in his pocket for a screwdriver. "Why do you ask? You got business with this guy?"

Wade sat in a lawn chair by the door. "Aww, just somethin' Trevor said."

" _Trevor_?" The name was spit out with more intensity than the average word. After, Ron became flustered for a few moments, his head shaking back and forth as if he were making checks on a mental grocery list.

"Oh, THAT Michael. I see now. He's dead."

The juggalo looked up. Dim-witted shock painted his face more clearly than the ICP makeup smeared there in juvenile patterns.

"Dead?" he queried, with all the innocence of a sweet young school marm. "Wadda ya mean, dead?"

"I mean _not alive_." The shuffling man clarified. He paused to run his hands suspiciously up the outer frame of his front door, then brought his screwdriver up to pry the molding away by a few centimeters. He peered behind it with narrowed eyes.

"...Michael. Michael Torning, or, or… _T-something_. Trevor's best friend, from years ago."

The sour look on Ron's face as the words _'Trevor's best friend'_ passed through his lips made his feelings on the subject plain. The fact that they were discussing a dead person did little to ebb away the obvious jealousy there.

Wade stared with wide, unblinking eyes. Finally looking away, his vision melted into the distance as he attempted to piece together the jigsaw puzzle's worth of evidence he'd gathered from over the years. It was a difficult task, all things considered. Wade knew fuckall about Trevor's past except that he came from up north, and honestly, even if he did know more, it would hardly be helpful. Between the enigma of Trevor Philips and the low-capacity wattage of Wade Hebert's basic brain functions, not a lot could be scraped into place. Wade frowned.

"You gotta take a shit? What's your problem?" the edge of Ron's face peered back at the kid from over a preoccupied shoulder.

"Huh? Nuh-uh! I was just thinkin'…"

"Uh-oh!" Ron joked, not unlovingly. Wade's frown tugged up into a little grin.

"I was thinkin', and… uh, well, what happened to that fella? That _Michael_? How'd he die? I ain't never heard Trevor talk about him much except, uh…" his grin vanished. "…once or twice."

Ron shrugged, turning fully back to his task at hand. "Who knows? I think he… got shot? Way I understand it, they weren't on great terms anyway, when that guy kicked it. Something about a fight over a stripper. Who cares? You know Trevor can get like that when he's riled up. Just forget about it."

"Dang! Well, was it Trevor that had shot hi-?"

"RON! BRING ME SOME COFFEE RIGHT NOW BEFORE I _FUCK A NEW EYEHOLE_ INTO THE SIDE OF YOUR CHEEK!"

The startled jump Ronald made at the sound of Trevor's unexpected bellow was violent enough to send his screwdriver scratching across his trailer's siding. A long white line marked the surface, forgotten immediately as the man whipped around.

"C-COMING, TREVOR!" he shouted, and dropped the screwdriver like it was hot iron. One last glance at Wade announced the end of their conversation. "Just forget about it. It's not important!" he repeated again, before turning on a heel and jogging off.

Wade continued to frown as he watched Ronald beating a hasty retreat. Across the yard, he saw that Trevor had lumbered out onto his porch, sweaty and shirtless like some hulking, snarling animal freshly risen from a deep hibernation. Oddly, this wasn't too far from the actual truth, considering how hard and long the criminal tended to sleep after going on a nasty bender. Wade's asshole twinged involuntarily a moment later, when the sound of Trevor's fist slamming into his front door echoed across the lot. When he punched the door again, apparently for no reason, the young man looked uncomfortably away, already beginning to feel the first prickles of fear in the pit of his stomach.

"WADE." The voice cut across him with a violent sharpness, like a crack across the face. Trevor _had_ always been able to instinctively sense his fear. "WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING JUST _SITTING_ THERE? GO MAKE ME SOME MONEY! WHAT DO YOU THINK THIS IS, EH? SOME KIND OF GODDAMN SPA RESORT? GET THE FUCK UP!"  

Immediately Wade jumped up to follow the command, jogging quickly across the yard to where a row of ATV's had been parked in a line. Wordlessly, he glanced over his shoulder to catch a glimpse of Trevor's agitated face, but paused at what he saw instead. The balding man had slumped down onto the couch on the porch, his tough hands circling the nape of his neck as he cradled his skull between his arms.

In his head, Wade involuntarily ran through the moment he couldn't forget, one more time. The desperate hands, the clenched teeth. That look of pain, as if it were a cap to everything else, a seal on the pit in which the cesspool of Trevor's emotions churned in angry tidal waves. The casing on a bomb.

' _Michael_.'

Wade clambered up onto an ATV and quickly fled the area.

 

\----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

 

 

Michael Townley did NOT suck cock.

It was below him. Or, was that _above_ him? He HAD always been an arrogant, self-important shit stain, too absorbed in his own storybook fantasies to look around and take notice of his place in life, surrounded by garbage and living in a dump like all the rest of them were. Whatever. He just…

 _Did. Not. Suck. Cock_. He didn't do it.

But his decidedly patchy morals were thinner in other areas. Enjoyably filthier areas, Trevor's slurred memories reminded him. He pumped his erection with a furious determination, and recalled the feeling of Michael's tight, wet hole clamping uncomfortably around the tip of his index finger. It was moments like these that Trevor allowed himself free-reign to imagine what he liked, taking the opportunity to work Michael's perfect, fat belly with his engorged erection, imagining rutting against his meaty ribs, smelling the smell of his sweat, his armpits, his balls, the backs of his ears. To see in his mind's eye the lurid fantasy he found himself constantly focused on, of Michael's narrow frown wrapped with purpose around his cock, his own hand shoved down the front of his pants. Trevor groaned, and swept a hand down over his balls, pushing the pressure forward and up until he felt sure he would burst like a rotten fruit. They never kissed, but imagining that they had was the last thought to tip him over the edge. Thinking of Michael's thin lips on his own, Trevor came with an angry snarl in hot, thick ropes across his naked chest. For long moments after, he laid in his bed, panting in staggered breaths like a dog in the sun. He was hungry. Ravenous, even. But somehow, never for food.

The room felt utterly empty then, and an unexpected surge of fear and panic jolted through Trevor's prone body like a bolt of lightning. He sat up with a gasp, his shortness of breath causing his heart to make a raucous cacophony inside the cage of his chest.

_Michael Townley was gone._

Michael Townley was _gone_. It _still_ hurt. Michael Townley was _fucking dead_ , and somehow despite all this, all Trevor could ever manage to do was savagely beat off to the bastardized memory of his missing friend, the greatest man he had ever known. Where was the fucking _respect_? With a disgusted grunt, Trevor scraped his fingers across his chest and flicked his jizz-coated hand out over the grimy floor. Where was the proper dignity which should have been allotted to Michael's memory? Hadn't they been _brothers_? And the way they had parted for the last time… a nauseous wave passed over Trevor with a forceful finality. A few drunken fumbles in the dark twelve years ago were _not_ a _carte-blanche_ to cum all over Townley's memory whenever Trevor felt so inclined. It was sick. It was disrespectful, and it was _wrong_.

That gut feeling of being ' _wrong'_ in every conceivable sense of the word spurred Trevor to his feet. He angrily wiped the rest of the cum off his body, rubbed his hand across his already-crusty sweatpants, and stormed out into the living room.

Ron sat casually on the couch, reading a discarded issue of _'Barely Legal Girls'_ with distant interest. When Trevor came into view, he shoved the issue beneath one thigh and looked up attentively. "Trevor! I was just, uhh--"

"-Shut up, Ron, I'm thinking."

"Oh! Sure, sure, you're thinking." Ron fumbled. "Fine, sure."

Michael Townley deserved _respect_. He was a fucking prick, but he had been a warrior, too. The real deal. At his core, he had been a true three bit gangster. A fucking king. He had stirred Trevor in ways he hadn't thought were still possible. Watching Townley work had always been like staring into a bright sunrise. Or something better. It had been the same elation that flying always brought on. It had tasted like freedom, like opportunity. Like the dry-sweet air you breathed in when flying over the tops of icy mountains, too light and heady and beautiful to ever truly be any good for you.

And yes, there was a lingering sense of arousal. But, hell, Trevor got hard-ons all the fucking time. He got a hard-on yesterday just from watching his ancient neighbor stuffing a bag of garbage down into her trashcan. That was beside the point. The point was…

The point was?? The sweaty man repeated the same concerns mentally back to himself, glaring Ron down.

The point was that sacred Michael Townley deserved fucking _better_ than any of _this_. Better than anything in this trash heap of an existence.

"Ron," Trevor suddenly barked, knowing precisely what he wanted in the snap of a moment. "bring me Ashley Butler. Bring her to me right now, I don't give a shit what you tell her, just bring her to me. Bring her here and then get the FUCK OUT for three hours. You hear me? THREE HOURS."

"Sure, yeah! Ok, Trevor! I'll go- g-go get her! Right now!" The stammer forced itself out of his sweaty minion. Ron stood, arms stiff at his sides as he stared moistly at Trevor's face.

The taller man raised an eyebrow and waited a beat. "Well? …fucking NOW, RON! NOW."

Ron jumped again, and was gone from the trailer in less than a heartbeat.

Trevor shoved the thought aside that he was surrounded by idiots. (It was true, nothing for it.) Instead, he replaced it with the more productive thoughts of what he was about to do to Ashley Butler. Or more specifically, what he was about to do to a number of her orifices. If jerking off to the thought of a dead Michael Townley made him feel like he wanted to die, he would have to fuck the shit out of that dopey bitch until he couldn't think about _anything at all_. She seemed like the best option with Wade's pooper being out of commission... and honestly? At the moment? Trevor couldn't stand the thought of sticking his dick into anything that was going to _cry_ right after. He wasn't a TOTAL monster.

He mulled it over, and rumbled quietly in approval.The plan seemed solid. _Felt_ , solid, he realized after a hand ghosted down to briefly grip his half-reinvigorated erection. It would do. It would _have to_ do. Michael Townley deserved respect, and fucking Ashley up the ass was the only way Trevor Philips could figure out how to show that.

"….You forget thousands of things every day…" he muttered to himself, and laid his palm over a bag of rock resting on the counter.

 

\----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

 

When he pulled back into the yard two hours later with a sack full of Sudafed slung over one shoulder, Wade instantly knew trouble was brewing. The very distinct sounds of Trevor violently fucking someone were, by this point, unfortunately known to Wade by heart. When the sound of a bottle breaking and a female yelp cut through the thin trailer walls, Wade immediately understood he would need to get his gun. Fucking Ashley Butler meant one thing; That messed up fella who had touched his thigh that one time after they'd all smoked together? Johnny? He would be making an appearance sometime in the not too distant future. But it was only when Ron came barreling into the yard not a moment later that Wade truly began to panic.

"-wuh, wuh what's-?!? Now?? Right _now_???" the Sudafed hit the ground, instantly forgotten.

"Don't do it, Johnny, it's not worth it, man! It's not worth it!" Ronald Jakowski shouted the jagged words out with a desperate tremor. The biker snorted a path behind him up the steps to the trailer, ignoring Ron's waving arms with the furious look of a raging bull. Johnny's face was beet red, almost cartoonish. Terrified visions flashed across Wade's mind as he ran towards the other men, though they mostly centered around the imminent fear that he would be forced to clean disemboweled biker guts off of the couch that Trevor would fuck Johnny to death on. Probably sometime in the next ten minutes.

The trailer door slammed open, seconds before the gaggle had reached the porch. Wade jumped about a foot, then fell away, somehow sensing the traffic about to blow backwards. Trevor stormed from the trailer, his face drained of all color. He seemed not to see them as he shoved his way out into the open, though as he brushed past Wade, the juggalo thought he heard him faintly mutter the words, _"…thousands of things…"_

A thousand things? What things? What now? Was it a game? The young man's fear was momentarily pushed away in favor of confusion.

"TREVOR!"

"STOP IT, JOHNNY!" Ashley skittered out onto the porch after Trevor's ominously silent exit. "Just LEAVE IT!"

"It's not worth it, Johnny! It's not worth it!"

Wade fell into the rush of the crowd, both flummoxed and panicky as he attempted to force dazed hands into some kind of action. He settled on a sort of full-body tremor which shoved everyone equally.

"We all get high! WE ALL GET HIGH! THAT DON'T MAKE IT RIGHT!"

"Johnny, quit it man! I'm sorry Trevor, I'm sorry! I tried to stop him! I tried!"

"TREVOR!" the slippery surface of Johnny's leather jacket wormed itself out of Wade's balled fists. "TREVOR! I'M TALKING TO YOU, MOTHERFUCKER!"

Several paces down the road, Trevor finally came to a frightening stop. Wade glanced to a hand at his arm to see Ron silently shake his head once, before they both fell back.

"…Are you?" Trevor breathed the words towards Johnny at last in a hot gust. His voice was quiet, but even at a distance, the sound rolled across the dusty street and kissed Wade's ears with promises of pain. Always pain.

"Well, what are you saying?"

To most of the outside world, it was a reasonable, measured response. To Wade Hebert, the words sliced him with an icy bolt of fear. Something here was more than just ' _a little off'_. More than yesterday, or the day before, more than any other day. Face fucking Wade was one thing. (At least he got drugs out of the other end of that deal, even if it _was_ a raw one.) This, though? THIS?? This was _exactly_ the kind of Bat Shit Scary Trevor that Wade would literally run _miles_ to get away from. He squinted across the distance at Trevor's waxy pallor, at the way his hands shook with the a faint tremor… Hebert's second aunt by marriage, Miranda? Well, she had palsy AND Alzheimer's, and he remembered she sometimes had an expression a lot like this one… a kind of terrified fury, all sweat-drenched and shivering. If Wade didn't know any better, he would say that his friend looked like a burnt-out race horse. He was completely winded, and for some reason Johnny seemed not to be picking up on a single one of Trevor's cues. Was Trevor… scared? Petrified? No, not for himself. Angry? He had to be angry. He was _always_ angry. Or… was he? Even after an eon's worth of days spent staring at the criminal's wrinkled face, Trevor Philips was still a hard man to read. Something was wrong, that much was obvious. It was obvious even to Wade's own admittedly _basic functions_. But the question of 'what?' lingered frustratingly unanswered. Ashley pushed roughly past them, though she at least seemed to sense the inherent danger in the words being exchanged, and lingered hesitantly on the periphery.

"I think..?" Wade whispered loudly, even as he edged farther back. "…that we…" a few more steps, "…should get some plastic bags!"

"He's fucked!" Ron whispered in return, "He's fucking _fucked_!"

Like waiting for a jack-in-the-box to finally blow open, the three of them stood like quivering pillars, and watched.

 

 

\----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

 _Michael_.

 

"Fucking my girl, man! It's wrong!"

 

 _Fucking_.

 

"Well, I gotta fuck someone! You want me to fuck you instead? Is that the problem here?"

 

 _Townley_.

 

Trevor caressed his hand softly across Johnny's stomach, taking in the mixture of revulsion and apology being fed back to him with a grain of sand. "Come on, cowboy… _lets fuck_."

Michael Townley's face behind a pair of Trevor's aviators as they rocketed down the highway with all the windows open. Michael Townley's shoulders, broad and confident, as they hightailed it down a rain-soaked stretch of concrete. Michael Townley's laughter as he flirted with a 15 year old bubblegum snapping motel clerk.

"Take off… your pants."

Michael Townley pressed up against a sweating brick alley wall, his pants undone as a hooker with orange lipstick sucked him off. Michael Townley's flushed face turned slightly towards him at a dive bar, their fingers barely brushing underneath the table. Michael Townley opening the door to his trailer, half-naked and still smelling like pussy and cheap vodka.

"You think this is _funny_?"

Michael Townley's veins bulging in his sweaty forehead, each of them shouting the other down for the 50th time that week. Michael Townley's pregnant whore of a stripper girlfriend glaring at him from across the room. Michael Townley's condescending look after suggesting they go on a road trip together. Michael Townley's wedding ring.

"GET THEM OFF!"

Michael Townley's face so close to his own that he can smell the breath rolling across his face, and it smells so sweet, god, like warm beer and morning breath and deer musk, until in the distance a baby starts crying and that warmth is replaced with a cold emptiness.

Michael Townley telling him to _'just leave.'_

Orange burned Trevor's vision, blinding him with the staggering weight of his own rage. His hands moved as they always had, roughly, and of their own accord. A bottle smashed, words ripped from his throat and exploded like molotov cocktails of anger and despair, and suddenly he was looking down at the pulpy mess of what had once been a normal human skull. Brain squished out from a series of snapped cavities, as if it was a meaty kind of toothpaste. (not that Trevor owned any toothpaste. He hadn't since 1989.) It didn't matter though. Nothing mattered. None of it was important, except for one thing. Somewhere in the distance a woman was howling with grief, but all it served as was becoming a backdrop to Trevor's recollections of a beloved movie quote being repeated on the news, then the numb buzz which filled his head immediately after hearing it.

"GET UP! GET UP! …NO? FUCK YOU, THEN!" He kicked Johnny's body one last time, feeling none of the pleasure he normally derived from the wet crunch of broken body parts.

Michael _fucking_ Townley… Trevor faintly registered Ron and Wade scurrying after him as he dragged himself across the road and back towards where his Bodhi was parked in the hot sun.

Michael. Please, _not_ _Michael_.

It couldn't be. It was too fucking cruel, even by Townley's standards. It was impossible. Not after all these years. All these _wasted years_ of worshipping Michael's memory, of canonizing that tubby snake like he was some kind of glorious martyred war hero. All those nights he'd slept on the cold dirt next to that fucking tombstone like some piece of shit dog who had lost it's master, lost a brother, had lost, lost, lost so many things… It was unspeakable in it's inhumane reality.

Michael fucking Townley...

And yet he knew, undeniably, irrefutably, that it was true.

 

_…Michael Townley was fucking ALIVE._

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some of this chapter came with some in-game dialogue. Sorry, it's all from memory, so ITS PROBABLY NOT RIGHT! Haha, all I care about right now is dragging Trevor's heart through the mud as many times as humanly possible. Also, a big shoutout to every GTAV fanfiction writer who has ever inserted a joke about Trevor screaming at Ron to get his coffee. I am with you! Lets come up with SO MANY variations to that one-liner, I love it. Until next time!


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Trevor recalls his first sexual encounter with Michael. Wade is hauled away on an adventure to Los Santos.

 

When the sliding barbed wire fence of the Wahpeton Correctional Penitentiary clanged shut on its noisy track for the last time that evening, Michael had been there, waiting for him.

It was sad to think on now after all those years, about how _truly good_ Michael Townley had appeared to Trevor on that day, inside and out. How his thin little grin had been so infectious, his whole countenance fresh with life in the gold of the first of fall’s early sunsets. How when he had seen Trevor in the distance, walking towards him with only a single duffel bag slung over a narrow shoulder, his whole body seemed to perk up and take notice. It was sad to meditate on it, because it was a memory that would always be something fragile and precious. The smile Trevor had been greeted with was a look that still troubled him, to this day. It was the kind of look a person could stare at a ceiling for hours about. The thing was… the Michael Townley of this memory was ultimately untouchable. He was lost in a soft golden haze of nostalgia for a friendship long since vanished into the night.

It was a moment from back when their friendship was still untested. They had been running buddies only for a short while, progress unfortunately cut short when Trevor had knocked over a gas station he should have thought twice about who owned. (Michael would prove himself later on to be the thinker in their little operation.) And _this_ moment, _this one moment_ , had taken place _so many years ago_ … that it was barely all there anymore, just a fragile conglomeration of scraped-together images and feelings, a saccharine recollection held carefully together like one tries not to crush an unusually pretty snowflake before it melts in your hand. It was back from when they were barely past that _cautionless shithead kid_ stage. Back from when they had first met, bonding eternally over the stinking corpse of a man with a flare gun shell buried in his skull.  

Michael's worn plaid jacket hung open as if he were sweating, his face flush in the cool 50 degree evening. He had flicked his half-smoked cigarette away with a thoughtless gesture, and then strode forward the last few steps to meet Trevor in the middle of the lot, just outside of the prison vehicle checkpoint. The guard there gave Trevor a sharp look, before turning back with a disappointed grunt to a bent newspaper crossword puzzle.

Michael grasped Trevor's arm across the traffic blockade, his grip firm and sure.

"Hey, pal. It's good to, uh… really good to see ya. You wanna go grab a beer or somethin'?"

" _'Hey'_ yourself, you fat fuck," Trevor's fingers squeezed Michael's thick wrist like he might never let go. "I just spent the last 1,460 days looking at 3,000 _other_ fat fucks yanking on their puds and _whining, whining, whining_ about how _miserable_ they all were, so, you know what? I _do_ want that beer. But I want it with a pair of tits shoved in my face, ok? _Comprende, amigo_?"  

Townley had laughed then; his eyes twinkling in a way Trevor would watch slowly die away in increments over the next couple of years. He would see that sparkle replaced with worry, and then with wrinkles that would gather in sad little clusters around the corners of his eyes.

"You got it, man. I think there's a skin joint a couple miles from here? …But I ain't ever been to these parts before, so… well, we can figure it out."

Collecting Trevor Phillips after a four-year stint in prison was not a job for any man. All his family was either dead or missing. And yet… _Michael had come for him._ Somehow. Inexplicably, Michael Townley had cared enough to drive two hours out of his regular hunting grounds for this express purpose. Michael Townley _cared_.

Trevor remembered how their hands had lingered for a long minute in that initial grasp. It was chilly, but Michael's palms had been warm with sweat.

The sky was a star-dusted wall of black within the hour.

 

\----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

The Spearmint Pony Gentleman's Club, as it turned out, was just 15 miles down the road. It was located ominously between an abandoned mall complex, a motel that promised ' _microwave access'_ , and a gas station with pumps that looked like they hadn't been replaced since 1957. The interior looked about the same, quality-wise. Cheap, ripping red vinyl and linoleum lined all the available surfaces. It was made atmospheric with a series of covertly placed disco balls and strobe lights. It was dark, it was cheap, and above all, it was _not_ a federal prison.

No white supremacists with face tattoos trying to use Trevor as a human footstool. No prison guards offering to face fuck him in exchange for extra commissary funds, (actually that was a pretty great deal, all things considered,) and above all, nobody here was fucking _crying_. It was amazing how refreshing it was to be in a dark, contained space full of too many people, and yet not a single one of them was blubbering pathetically, whether it be about some misery they had committed, or one that had been committed to them. Trevor c _ould. not. handle. the crying_. He just, _couldn't_. Because it plucked at a chord inside him that he knew should have reacted to the sound, and yet didn't. It reminded him of being Trisha, and of hiding under the stairs from his parents, where he inevitably was always found. It had been a long four years of either trying to surprise-fuck people he hated in unexpected places, seeing how many teeth he could knock out of a man's head before a fight got broken up, or getting chained to a bed in solitary confinement. So, sort of enjoyable sometimes, but mostly, it had just been... _so, tremendously, tedious._

But Michael was here now. So in that sense, The Spearmint Pony was as close to heaven as Trevor assumed he was ever going to get. He sunk into the squeaky embrace of a private booth, and nuzzled his mustache into the velvety curtain that closed it off from the rest of the bar. Five minutes, four whiskey shots, and $200 later, a blank faced woman with blonde extensions and enormous silicon breasts was grinding in his lap.

For a while, time ceased to have meaning. The comfortable daze of sitting close with his brother as they drank, laughed, and fondled their way towards some sort of camaraderie settled on them well, even after time apart. At that point Michael was too stupid to know any better than to trust Trevor, and Trevor was decidedly far too sentimental to question any of Michael's motivations. They fit together perfectly, both comfortable in the unusually symbiotic nature of their relationship. Later, Trevor would agonize over every moment he could recall, retrace every _minute detail_ as he hunted for evidence he could use to burn Michael De Santa to the ground in every possible sense. But Michael Townley lived in this memory like some kind of fat, quivering saint. The kind of saint who smelled like the grime between your fingers after sweating on a steering wheel for two hours to come rescue your best buddy from prison. He was perfect, in other words.

Michael had obviously come prepared that evening, because by the time the blonde woman climbed off Trevor's lap leaving him smelling like crotch sweat and sporting an enormous erection, she waved his money away and instead hailed a server over to set a pint glass of some kind of clear liquor in front of him. Trevor's hand ghosted to the lump in his pants, and he idly rubbed down on it, intently following the woman's ass with his eyes as she walked away.

Sitting across the narrow room now, Michael was running his thick fingers up the thighs of the stripper in his lap. She was thrusting her naked breasts into his flushed face. They appeared to be talking quietly to one another. A twinge of unexpected jealousy hit Trevor a moment later, when something the woman said caused a stupid grin to crack Townley's face open into a shy but pleased smile. With an agitated grunt, Trevor leaned forward and grabbed the drink in front of him, downing the entire pint in a single reckless chug.

She didn’t seem _that_ funny. What could a stripper possibly have to fucking say to a guy like Michael Townley? To that small town baby? He fuckin’ wasn’t _handsome_. It had to be the money, considering the definite splurging that was happening tonight on all fronts. Definitely. Because what else was there to like? Michael Townley belonged with _him_ , was that not clear enough?? Because they came from the same garbage heap that meant they weren’t marriage material for succubae like these. That chunky fuck had been wearing the same stupid hunting coat every day for what, five years? Probably longer. AND he was an obnoxious sentimentalist too, when it came to stupid shit like movies and books. Oh yeah, because he could _read_. _Really well_. And he knew how to spell and shit, because he’d actually _graduated_ from high school unlike a lot of the rest of them. (Wait, where was the insult in this again?) Admittedly, he _did_ have a certain bravado sometimes that was charming. And his thick arms looked great when he was shoveling stolen goods down the front of his shirt. Trevor’s face turned downwards into a sort of half-scowl, half-grimace as he watched his friend flash his set of clean, straight teeth through the semi dark.

Years later, Trevor would remember this petulant version of himself and treasure it like a beloved secret diary. This Trevor had been… still… _sweet_ , somehow. Still with a modicum of innocence that being beaten by his father, or touched by his mother, or even being kicked out of the Royal Canadian Air Force still hadn't managed yet to fully rip away. He had been old enough to know how to do a _few_ things… Like, how to commit arson and get away with it. Or how to skin a deer 6 different ways. (Or a dog. Or a cat. Whatever was walking around, really. A hitchhiker. Whatever.) But he had still been too young to know some of the finer points. He hadn't yet reached that terrifying precipice he would eventually dive over headfirst, after the 2004 bank heist that would so thoroughly fuck his mind and his life. If there had ever been any hope for him, a moment at which he might have been able to turn back, it would have been then. If it had ever truly existed in the first place. It was almost comical in its ultimate tragedy.

For now, Trevor still didn't know the feeling of delivering an unknowing victim to their killers. Or the way the ground would shake when he would put a bullet through the side of a propane tank driving 85 miles an hour down the highway. The smell of human flesh as it was consumed by fire. Or worse yet, the taste of that very same human flesh, mingling with the acrid burn of methamphetamines. After all, by this point he had only ever killed one man intentionally. (If you didn't include his clarinet teacher that one time back from between care homes. And Trevor _didn't_. He had been an _asshole,_ just like his _fucking hockey coach_.)

It would be at least a decade before Trevor would wake up for the first time naked and lost, surrounded by unfamiliar corpses.

Michael had clumsy hands. They were babyish and fumbling, Trevor noticed, as he slunk slowly down on one elbow and continued to stare at his friend. How could hands like that grasp a gun ordinarily with such confidence? _Weak_. The thought dripped with venomous judgment, though oddly it was more directed at the stripper than Michael himself. She had turned around now, and was backing up that enormous ass to bounce up and down on his lap to the heavy bass of whatever crappy club music was pounding through the speakers. (It _wasn't_ punk or classic rock, so who gave a fuck what it was? Give Trevor some _Suicidal Tendencies_ , a handle of shitty whiskey and a baseball bat any day of the week.)   Michael, for his part, looked like he was in heaven. He always _had_ been a self-indulgent piece of white trash that was too big for his britches, but debatably in all the right ways. The insult confusingly became a compliment in the middle as Trevor mulled it over, and absently a hand drifted down to return to the tent in his pants. Across the room, Townley's own tent bounced in and out of sight beneath the gyrating posterior of the dancing woman.

Clumsy hands, sure. But they were strong hands too. Mikey had strong hands. _So_ _strong_. a sloppy wave of drunkenness sloshed down over Trevor, and he pressed down on his boner with his palm, his breath hitching a little in his throat.

Michael's strong hands ghosted up and down the naked thighs which straddled his lap, then pushed between them to run light fingers up the dip of the woman's spine. His face was red with alcohol and lust. He was barely bothering to contain the covetous looks, the way his hips bounced up just a little at every grind, the obvious want for physical release painted plainly across his whole body.

Trevor remembered the way Michael had looked that first time, the time they had killed the man together with that stupid flare gun. His look of determination had been strong enough to cut a hot slice into Trevor's panic, almost entirely eradicating it. Michael had been the one to formulate the plan; Where to take the body, where to dump it. What to do with the extra car, what to say to who. Trevor had pulled the trigger, but Michael had taken the responsibility. Later, when they'd finished vomiting together in a little green patch on the side of the highway, Trevor had taken a long and hard look at Michael Townley's face. It had been the first moment he had ever recalled really wanting to kiss someone.

…to voluntarily kiss _anyone_.

With a quick pinch, Trevor unzipped his fly and stuck a few creeping fingers below his zipper to run along the crest of his ever-hardening erection. He wished Michael was naked, then imagined that he was. He imagined the beautiful woman in his lap was naked too, and that tubby Michael Townley was thrusting hard up into her soft orifices, that he was grabbing the malleable flesh of her ample thighs and using it to yank her down to grind onto his thick, slimy dick until he shot his load. Trevor's dick jumped at the sudden onslaught of crass fantasy that spread out before him in a deliciously perverse parade. (Most of which featured himself being somewhere wedged in the middle of a 3-way.) Trevor imagined a lot of things, four years of mostly solitary confinement feeding a steadily growing fire.

Just as his hand was slipping fully into his pants, Michael turned his head. From across the room, they locked eyes.

For several airless moments, they stared at each other with unblinking looks of surprise and alarm. Michael's eyes ricocheted up and down Trevor's lounging figure, from his face to the obvious source of attention located in his pants, then back up to his face again. Trevor stared back with a kind of flushed openness, his hand immobile, wondering if he should be feeling guilty when for some reason guilt was the farthest thing from his mind. And then the stripper ground down on Michael again, and his eyes rolled up before closing in an obvious look of pleasure. When his eyes opened again Trevor had commenced rubbing himself. They watched each other, Townley's body stuttering softly in lusty twitches, until a minute later his head jerked forward and he looked away in what seemed like tense pain. He reached up to still the dancing woman with a touch, and she bent down to whisper with him for a few moments. Soon after, Michael was nodding at her and she moved off, pausing only to stop in front of Trevor and give him a bored look.

"You can't do that in here." She said in a voice that was both deadpan and pornographic in it's practiced silkiness. She raised her eyebrow pointedly at the hand down the front of Trevor's pants. "Sorry honey, it's the rules, unless you wanna pay."

The hand stilled, though not without a matching sour look. "Well what the hell do you call what you just did to my buddy?"

The dancer shrugged once, looking like she was doing her taxes in the back of her mind instead of focusing on the debauchery around her. "The bouncers are gonna see you. Quit that." she just said once more, jabbing a finger, before turning on a spiked heel and sashaying off.

 

By the time Trevor looked across the room again, Michael had vanished.

 

\----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

It took approximately three days of freedom before Trevor finally lost his cool and shoved Michael unexpectedly up against a dumpster, quickly and efficiently jerking them off together with the long, practiced fingers of one dirty hand. They didn't kiss. They didn't discuss it either, instead hitting a diner and sitting for two awkward hours of silence while they pretended to drink coffee. But that night they met up with Trevor's old friend Brad at a dive bar on the edge of the pathetically small town of Ludendorff, and Michael had touched the side of his hand to Trevor's beneath the table long enough to make his intentions clear. Trevor blew him in the bathroom without conversation after their fourth beer, and a shady pattern was shakily established.

 

Three years later, Michael met a dancer named Amanda.

 

\----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Wade had seen Trevor angry before, but the week after he’d stomped Johnny Klebitz’s head into a fine hamburger paste really took the cake. It had taken a few days of side-eyeing Trevor’s boots to get over his initial shock, but his older friend’s level of carnage hadn’t stopped at just smashing skulls with the same force of chucking a watermelon off a 5th story roof. Wade supposed it would have been easier just to draw a line with gasoline around the whole town and then flick a match at it, but Trevor seemed to have a method to his madness… and that madness seemed to involve killing _everyone_ , starting with those scary guys from The Lost MC, and ending God only knew where.

But, far be it from Wade to interfere with any plan Trevor might have settled upon in the mood he was currently in. Honestly, Wade’s asshole was still _a mess_ , and all that Sudafed he’d turned over to Chef meant another big batch of crystal was on the way. He _needed_ that. There was just no benefit in arguing with Trevor, ever. Even to a guy like Wade, there wasn’t any sound logic, because somehow, Trevor was always right. He was a genius, after all.

Also, he was scary. Like, _really_ scary. Even Ron agreed with him there.

And anyway, it had been Wade’s new assignment that had been the _really_ frightening thing. Trevor had said the name Wade didn't understand, except this time, with a purpose beyond anything the young man could even _remotely_ begin to piece together.

“I couldn’t find any Michael _Townley_ ," the name even _tasted_ strange on his already thick tongue. " ...buuutt… I _did_ find a… a… Michael… _De Santa_?”

Trevor looked livid. Or, more livid than 5 minutes ago, which was to say, very very. 

“…What’s his wife’s name?”

The pregnant silence that followed the words was thicker than the oppressive heat of the summer air, and Wade suddenly had a feeling that the answer he had was his ticket to being locked in an outdoor dog crate. Again.

“… _Amanda_?”

That scary look that the meth dealer had been wearing all week exponentially multiplied, and Wade kicked himself internally as Trevor's fist slammed into the side of his face yet again that afternoon. This time, with a punch that strangely felt like a victorious exclamation. Flashbacks to Trevor muttering that same name, _'Michael'_ , returned to the juggalo over and over again as he hauled himself up off the ground one more time. Was this a joke? Wasn't.... wasn't that fella supposed to be, you know... _dead_??

Dead, dead? Like, a ghost, or something? Like Ron, had said, definitely _not alive_?

"DON'T EVER NOT TELL ME THINGS I WANNA KNOW AGAIN! Now, COME ON!" And yet, Trevor seemed sure about something, even as he turned and stalked down into the yard.

So _sure_.

So, wait. He... this _Michael_. He... really _wasn't_ dead? Really? _Really, really_?? But, what did that mean? And where were they _going_? Where did dead folks who weren't really dead go to hang out when they were pretending to be dead but weren't actually dead but still wanted to be? Or did he? Where? Huwhat? But, and... who??

Wade swallowed his questions in the name of fear for his personal well-being, instead forcing his simple mind to turn towards more innocent subjects. Like re-setting the factory default on a tape recorder, he simply wiped the slate clean and opted for a fresh start.

"Can we get ice-cream on the way??"

They were in the Bodhi and hurdling towards Los Santos in less than five minutes, dog crates and methamphetamines lost behind them in a filthy cloud of dust.

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> EDIT: I fixed the Wade POV part of this because I was too lazy to finish editing when I initially posted it. Carry on!
> 
> HI GUYS. So I started writing this story out of my butt, and after this chapter it's finally beginning to take a little shape and have some direction?? I didn't work too hard on this chapter, you guys, I'm just trying to poop out all these trikey feels. Also BLESS all these tropes that I keep seeing are getting formed, like the 'michael and trevor at the strip club' thing I keep seeing on tumblr. god bless, I need more fanart.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Trevor recalls the origin of ‘cut here’. Michael and Trevor address old wounds.

_Crunch Crunch Crunch Crunch_

It was an old dream… a memory fragmented by dark shadows. Night terrors passed in and out with the recollections, always leaving Trevor frigid and staring uselessly at the ceiling, coated in a sick sweat. Like many things about himself, he didn't like contemplating this dark period in his life. And yet… it slid in the cracks when he wasn't careful. It came under the doors and dug up through his skin to settle, heavy and sad, in the center of his chest. The criminal was good at discarding old sad memories. He had practiced. It wasn't so much that he forgot them as he merely set them aside, allowing them to pile up far away and out of reach. But some memories defied containment. This one, perhaps the darkest moment in an already morbid life, returned perennially. It was a king of bad memories… a keystone that held together so many other terrible sadnesses. A dud bomb.

_Crunch Crunch Crunch Crunch_

Nine years and the memory of his icy boots sinking past his ankles into the snow remained just as vivid. The Canadian trudged doggedly through a rapidly growing drift, his hands stuffed in the pockets of his thick green coat. He had cut across a dead intersection, down a few dark alleys, and beneath an unusual number of darkened streetlights before seeing any sign of a single person. Trevor remembered wondering briefly if he wasn't actually the last man alive. But then he had seen other evidence… He saw windows wink out from long distances away, warm yellow light switching to cold black. He had seen parked cars vanishing beneath mounds of blue powder, only to become smallish hills in a much greater glimmering landscape. And he saw his own footprints behind him, solid and real, even if they were quickly buried again as if he had never been there to begin with.

The snow had been thick that night. Thicker than he remembered it coming down in years, and yet it had snowed without fury. It had come in fat clumps of lazy feathers, falling down in an unrelenting barrage. There had been no wind, and there had been little sound. The distant whistle of air moving through treetops and chimneys became steadily deadened by the heavy white blanket as it consumed everything beneath it's hungry belly. It _could_ _have_ been cathartic, if Trevor had been able to make himself feel such a thing. But he hadn't been able to.

The only telling evidence that Trevor was, indeed, in the _right place_ could be seen in the silhouette of the building he stood in front of. No double about it… despite the drift, the building was decidedly church-shaped. A church was a church was a church, and if Trevor knew anything, he knew that THAT… was definitely a church. He had everything right… The right sleepy town, the right innocuous street, the right stone and cast iron wall dripping with heavy icicles. Check check check. (Also repeatedly circling a map location with a ballpoint pen until utterly destroying the paper did something to commit an address to memory. But that was the story of a nervous tic for another day.) It had to be the right church. Ludendorff was small.

Oh, and then there was the _insignificant detail_ that he had already been here before. For a nominally average heist that had somehow gone terribly, _terribly_ wrong. Trevor had arrived back in town again after a small rollover amount of time during which he had fled over the border and briefly lost his mind. He had been back in Ludendorff for six days. He had been standing in the snow for the past 24 hours.

 _It wasn't been safe before._ The thought gnawed at him, forcing guilt up his already raw throat. There had been… people… _everywhere_. FIB agents, news reporters, lawyers, notaries, mourners. He had even caught a glimpse of Amanda's immaculate ponytail as she had exited the church a few days previously.

Trevor, _on the other hand_ , had spent the time hidden away at one of the little town's shitty motels, drinking himself blind. He had half-convinced himself that everything that had happened up until this point had just been some kind of fucked up fantasy. That everything could be fine, _was_ fine, _had been_ fine, would _continue to be_ fine. The other half of him suicidally snorted drugs, and had _fully_ convinced himself that the wallpaper was crawling off the walls at night and trying to smother him in his sleep. (HA, well, he'd show them, Trevor Philips would just NEVER SLEEP AGAIN. 24 hours of success thus far and counting.) Killing himself was becoming a more and more palatable alternative by the hour, and Ludendorff wasn't exactly known as hub for mental health care, much less even such a thing as a tourist destination. (Counting out being the home of the country's largest Beaver.) In fact, the people currently living in Ludendorff seemed unsettlingly suicidal in their own right. But fortunately for the inebriated thief, guns Ludendorff had _a-plenty_. Much of Trevor's time had been spent contemplating the brand-spankin-new revolver he kept under his pillow, the safety purposefully clicked off. He could always maintain the hope that he would forget that it was there and flop down on the bed just a _little too hard_. Blamo, no more Trevor. No more Trisha. Nada. Nothing.

The thought of that gun, heavy and cold on his sheets back at his motel, offered him some small comfort now as he stood at the gate to the cemetery he knew he would one day have to face. Trevor shouldered through before he lost his nerve, and fell in amongst the tombstones beyond, their flat ridges piled high with fluffy ice like cakes sitting on a table. He didn't quite know what direction to go in, moving only by some vague instinct, but his feet refused to stop moving now that he had crossed the most intimidating of thresholds. The grave would be fresh, though it would be difficult to tell such a thing in the thick snow. How could you spot the difference between a fresh grave and an old grave? Would there be a sign or something? Flowers? What? Trevor had a few vague memories of when his brother had died, and how they had burned him at the crematorium until all that was left of Ryan was a coffee can full of dust. All the Philips' family was cremated. At least, Trevor's mother had said as much a long time ago, while threatening Trevor with her claws around his wrist and a cigarette pushing into his palm. Fire was a cheap alternative to the luxury of a casket funeral. Fire suited them, it sought them out. Just burn the body and scatter the ashes on the street, his mother had insisted. Snuff them out in a brittle sneeze of dust. Burn them and be done with it.

_But not Michael._

The thought was sudden.

No, Michael was too fuckin' fancy for something as utilitarian as a cremation. He had always had an attitude like he was some big goddamn fish in this little toilet bowl of a world. His education and his ambition had somehow made him a step above the rest, blinding him partially to the filth which surrounded them on all sides. No, _no_ , Michael would get the box. He would have the _box_ and the _suit_ and the _flowers_ and the engraved _headstone_ and the beautiful weeping widow in a veil, clutching her perfect sobbing children and thinking about cashing in on his life insurance policy while eyeballing the minister's package. Michael fucking Townley would have it all, because he deserved it all. Every goddamn thing. And then they would put him in the cold ground and he would rot there forever, until eventually even his name would be forgotten in time by anyone who was tasked with keeping it.

Trevor stumbled over a hidden stair and fell roughly against a stone cross before violently righting himself again, scraping his hand on the cold rock. The pain flared up hot and sharp, rattling his senses.

God, please… _not Michael_. Anybody else. Children. Nuns. Nobel Peace Prize winners... _Anyone_. Anyone else would do. _Why_ did he have to be _here_? _Why did it have to be Michael Townley?_

But then, there it was. There… _he_ … was. There was _the grave_ , and the misfit criminal knew as he shook the sting out of his palm that there was no going back. He ghosted his nervous hand up to smooth out his mustache and stepped over the hidden stair.

The silent graveyard swallowed up the sudden bark of laughter Tevor shot into the cold night air. The tombstone several feet up the incline from himself was very clearly labeled 'MICHAEL TOWNLEY'. The dates were correct and the stone was surprisingly snow-free, though icicles dripped down from the topmost ledge. It seemed to be at a strange juncture where it stood under the wind cover of a larger sarcophagus. Maybe it was merely a coincidence. Or maybe it was just _unusually cruel fate_. (This being the option Trevor was most inclined to believe.) He had half hoped to get so ass-backwards lost that he would become completely unable to find where Michael Townley had actually been buried. He had wanted to allow the errand to pass him by as if it were no more than a sad dream. But ever the fucking show pony, Michael was there, with a clean fucking tombstone, and upon further inspection, with a wreath of frozen white carnations as well.

The unapologetic reality of the scene brought on another laugh, though this time the sound was slow and thick and dirty, dripping with doubt. Yellow teeth grinned steamy vapor, and a little shaky chuckle punctuated the end. Was this all there was left of Michael Townley now? A cold rock and some icy mud? Nervous sounds rumbled out of his mouth and fell down through the dead air. Silence consumed the yard again, and all the oxygen vanished in a single moment from Trevor's lungs, as if he had been thrown headfirst into the cold vacuum of space.

So. Michael Townley really _was_ dead.

' _Listen, T, you don't mind if I call you T, do ya? No? Alright, well you listen to me good, kid, because we ain't takin' a fall for this guy.'_ How debonair could Michael have been, that day? How in control of the situation, despite the sweat that poured down his neck and into his collar? _'Here's what I want you to do; I want you to throw his ass in the back of the goddamn plane, ok? Right now. Because we still have enough time to make the drop. We can still make some dough outta this shit situation and nobody'll be the wiser for it! I know he stinks, I know this whole freakin' situation stinks, pal, but see, if we can just work through this last push together? …We can ditch him in the river, make a tidy little profit, and then I'll take you and me out to the nearest titty bar in town and we'll get shitface drunk, how's that sound? You're lookin' a little green around the gills, to be honest.'_

Michael's hot breath stunk like stale beer and deer musk, rolling across Trevor's face. His hand reached out to steady against Trevor's shoulder, strong and reassuring, as snow began to pile up on the Canadian's shoulders, dusting his thin hair.

_T, what the hell you still hangin' around here for? This place aint for you. Listen, it's gonna be alright!_

With a sudden violent snort, Trevor sucked in the snot that had begun to dribble down his nose and wracked a coat sleeve across his face. "You don't _know that_ , Mikey."

Michael was slinging an arm around Trevor's neck, grinning jovially at some stupid joke. He was folding old pairs of boxers and placing them in a meticulous stack on the crisp sheets of a motel bed. He was loading his gun, then firing off rapid shots. He was leaning over a sheet of blueprints with a greedy glimmer in his eye and a red marker clamped in his teeth. He was clutching Trevor's arm, rubbing their sweating foreheads together as Trevor's hand quickly worked them over. Michael was cradling his daughter for the very first time. Michael was snoring, he was taking a shower, he was shouting, he was eating, drinking, laughing. Michael was staring at him in quiet contemplation from across the room.

' _Devastated Shock_ ' was a kind way to phrase things. Trevor's grip on the barriers of physical reality had never been particularly strong, and at the moment, Michael Townley's tombstone was outside of his comprehension. It's meaning sunk only very slowly into him, like a subtle poison, cutting off first his thought patterns, then his air supply, and no doubt next his ventricles and heart valves and electrical impulses and all the other boring organic functions he needed to stay somehow ill-advisedly alive. It was a nonsensical activity to live on without the lighthouse that had been Michael Townley to direct his course. How the hell had he done it for so many long years alone? But there it was. His stupid, simple answer. He _hadn't_ done it before, because he had _always_ been alone. Until Michael had come along.

Trevor coughed once, conscious of the liquid freezing painfully on his ruddy face. "…I'm _not_ gonna leave you, Mikey."

…But then again, who was it that had really done the leaving? The cops, the FIB, men in full swat uniform, pouring out from every corner, every alleyway… When had everything tangled so helplessly together? Why hadn't he been able to save Michael? After he had tried, tried, tried, pushed so far, so hard… Why had he left Michael to die alone in the middle of the frozen street as wolves descended on his corpse? Was it for the money? Or was it their brotherhood that had chided them, made them push too far, too fast? But Michael always planned. He was always right, he always called the good shots. Why had this time been so horribly different? After so many years together, why couldn't Trevor have been the one to set things right again? To do the rescuing, for a change? Why did he always have to be such an incorrigible _fuck up_? What would Trevor do now? Brad in prison, Michael dead… _Michael gone forever_ … What _could_ he do?

Trevor had no recollection of his transition to the patch of slush below Michael's tombstone. Of why his hands were somehow suddenly torn to shreds, of why icy mud filled his boots and dripped down the back of his pants. Why carnation petals scattered sadly in a pathetic ring around his knees.

Neither did he recall how, shortly after, his coat began to fill up with blood.

 

\----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Floyd Hebert's sofa was large enough to comfortably accommodate one body, though over the past week Trevor had tested that limit a number of times. It's once tidy upholstery was now a riddled mess of pizza stains, donut crumbles, and an ever increasing number of blob-shaped crusty spots comprised of Hebert Family fluids. All-in-all, it had been a solid week of homemaking, if nothing else about the week had been particularly good.

Trevor hit the play button on his phone again, lounging with one arm behind his neck. The sounds of Lazlow's petrified blubbering filled the empty apartment in a tinny echo, followed up by Trevor's own lower mocking rumble.

' _Please! Please…'_

' _alriiight, I want to see you dance SEXY for me, celebri~taay… Hmmmm!'_

The small screen flickered color across Trevor's dirty face. Thick eyebrows furrowed together a moment later, when Michael Townley's robust laughter swelled up and rolled out across the audio. He had been standing next to Trevor, ( _alive_ , VERY MUCH alive,) and the recording had picked it up more loudly than any of Lazlow's pathetic pleading. It was a sound which burned now, in all the ways something precious and missed could hurt you after it vanishes. The video ended, and then repeated again from the beginning. More laughter. Trevor's frown dug deeper ridges.

Dark thoughts circled like buzzards in Trevor's mind as the sound of Michael Townley laughing echoed back to him. (Or what was it now?… Michael… De..? De… Se.. Sa… _Whatever The Fuck_.) Regardless of whatever the fuck that fuckface's _fake fucking_ name was, it was definitely still him. There was only one Michael Townley. He was an original goddamn work of art. No man could be, or ever _would_ be what Michael Townley was. But things were different now. And even more frighteningly, _Michael_ seemed different. Exceedingly so. And on that point, Trevor couldn't seem to settle his mind on a way to feel, one way or the other. Obviously anger was omni-present. Resentment laid on him thick and heavy, flavoring all things about his stint in Los Santos. But a confusing jumble of other emotions also rattled the cage of Trevor's mind. Adrenaline-addled jubilation at his dead best friend's resurrection, for one. A palpable hunger for his company, for two. (Though for nefarious or heartfelt purposes was irrelevant.) And after that, anger again. Anger anger anger. Always anger. The cacophony sometimes became so loud that it made it impossible to think.

_Gratitude._

FURY!

_Relief._

BETRAYAL!

Michael laughed again, and the sound enveloped the pilot in a thunderous black cloud.

 _Michael was alive._ Michael _fucking_ Townley was _fucking_ _alive_. A thousand past moments came with the revelation. Remembered thoughts, touches, feelings.

God, he was _inside everything_. The realization burned. That… magnanimous _turd_ … had infiltrated every level of Trevor's sorry excuse for a life. He was like a parasite in deadly need of extraction. It was ludicrous. it was stupid. It was… _horrible_ , actually. And Michael hadn't even _been there_ for the last nine years of it. He was the absentee father, the mentor that abandons the pupil. He was a betrayer. _If only he could cut Michael out!_ If only blood was the way to solve the problem! But like every time Trevor thought blood was the answer, it left him feeling cold, and frightened of himself on the other side. Blood was only ever for the sake of blood. Better to be honest about it… having a noble motivation for it was pure masturbatory fantasy. Trevor's pulse hammered violently against the ink tattooed in an angry slash across his throat. _Cut here._ Crass words from a desperate man.

' _oh god, please don't kill me! I'm just a dumb A-List celebrity, I don't wanna die!'_

The times Trevor had considered killing himself after Townley's ' _death_ ' were too numerous to be able to count by now. Even with a calculator wristwatch, it was a pointless activity. It would have been like trying to count snowflakes during a blizzard. The fact that Trevor had been too much of a _fucking pussy_ after that first time to intentionally commit the deed again himself was a demon he still wrestled with _._ Not after that initial snowy attempt at bringing his pathetic spectacle of a life to an end. …But that experience had opened _other doors_ , paths to darker places. It had made having a death wish a _hell_ of a lot easier, for one.

Anyway, the more he ruminated on the subject, suicide was so fucking trite, wasn't it? …Trite and cowardly, an end for death row prisoners and hipster musicians, NOT Trevor fucking Philips, BUSINESSMAN. It had been so much easier to concede to killing himself slowly. To agreeing to be that carrion eating motherfucker for as long as possible, and just let the world do it's job. It was dog-eat-dog out there. He would let it chip away at his physical and mental health over time, and he could just _assuage_ the _pain of living_ with drugs and guns. And on occasion, with the wet snap of flesh and bone giving way under his fingers. He had never fit in particularly well anywhere else anyway. And after everything, he could do this final short haul to the finish line. Be that by huffing gasoline, getting drunk and falling down a mountain, or merely by sitting in front of his damaged flower of a tortured mother and simply letting her… _talk_. By hook or by crook, death was coming. But in Trevor's frustrating case, it just… happened to be taking its sweet time.

' _please, no! please! please!"_

The familiar tremors of a dark and terrible panic attack washed over his head, and Trevor was suddenly overwhelmed by the seemingly endless expanse of time still ahead of himself to live through. Trials to pass, money to obtain, ordeals to conquer… _Things_ to _kill_.

For long moments Trevor stared blankly at Floyd's ceiling, his pupils blown wide. When Michael's laughter cut across him again, however, the man had finally had enough. Slamming his phone down, he abruptly sat up. A deeply complicated influx of hurt and anger overtook him then. It shook him with its intensity, to the point where his knees began to tremble. For a few reckless moments, the sweating criminal considered his hand, and imagined slamming the knife in his boot down through his wrist and into the coffee table. Confusion wrapped him up after that, and by the time his dizzy roller coaster of emotional reactions had circled back around to regular anger again, he was sitting up stiffly enough on the crusty couch that he had a good vantage point on Floyd as he stumbled back into the apartment.

The door clicked shut. Footsteps rounded the corner and the more dutiful of the Heberts froze as he spotted Trevor, a deer caught in headlights. His hand slowly went up to pull his reflective vest up over his head, eyes never leaving the man on the sofa.

"Well now," he swallowed audibly. "…Hey… Hey there Trevor!"

" _Mmmmmh_ , 'Hey' yourself!" Trevor rumbled, a suddenly dangerous glint coming over him all at once. Like a mountain lion zooms in on the kill, the ex-pilot found himself with an unexpected and yet decisively clear focus. Inside his head, the noisy racket of horrible warring feelings died down to a low growl. "Working hard or hardly working?"

"Erruh… what?"

A distinctly feral grin cracked the side of Trevor's face, and he slowly rose to his feet.

 

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Wade closed the door to the apartment as the news anchor on the television across the room was announcing the ten o'clock hour. Los Santos was a magical city _full_ of opportunity, as far as the younger Hebert was concerned. His day could not possibly have been any grander, considering the quality of a normal day-in-the-life scenario belonging to the young juggalo. He hadn't cleaned up ANYBODY'S puke, for one. No late night Sudafed hunts, no beating back encroaching indigenous populations of raccoons, rats and coyotes. No getting shoved in the dirt, no motorcycle boots kicking down hard into his spine, _no getting locked in crates_. Hell, Trevor hadn't even tried to touch him where the sun don't shine one time since they'd arrived. And a nice lady in a bikini had given him a free corndog on the boardwalk, so Los Santos definitely ranked highest so far on Wade's list of 'Fun Places To Visit And Not Die'.

The young man moved jauntily across the room, before upending his backpack out onto the coffee table in a thoughtless, albeit joyful shuffle. The news switched to commercials, and the room was plunged into the technicolor flicker of a Burger Shot sing-along.

" _When you need some hot meat that hits the spot, cruise on over to Burger Shot_!" He tonelessly hummed along with the melody. "Cousin Flooooyd? Trevor? Anyone home?"

On the table, the juggalo's prizes from the day sat in a glimmering mound. A pile of candy, lottery scratchers, a switchblade, some wooden beads, two-for-one coupon vouchers, a half ounce of weed, nine bottles of Nyquil, a pack of grape flavored rolling papers, one dented can of Sprunk, two wadded up $50 bills, and one unintentionally disturbing clown mask with a small tuft of red hair, all buried something which, until that moment, had gone unnoticed by Wade. It was imbedded in the wood. The young man quirked his head at a curious angle, before slowly reaching his hand out to give a second inspection, brushing his acquisitions aside.

His hand came in contact with something cool, and irrevocably fixed into place.

A… handle. A hilt? Deeeeefinitely a hilt. (Like, a big one!)

Carefully, Wade pushed the rest of the candy back. Like Crocodile Dundee, Trevor's hunting knife stuck out at a dramatic angle from the far right end of the wood. For a blank moment Wade stared at the knife as he attempted to fit it's presence together into a grander puzzle. (Did he smell something burning?) But it was only when he heard Floyd softly weeping from the bedroom that the dullest Hebert finally began to suspect something was wrong.

"…Cooooouuusin?" He knocked on the door. "Cousin Floyd? …is you in there?"

The snuffling stopped for a long moment. "-No, no I'm not! Go away, this ain't your business!"

"-But Floyd! Yer _family_! And kin's business is my business, aint it?" The idiotic response, shouted as if to a deaf person, communicated zero understanding. "I had the best gosh darn time today, I got candy! And a corndog! Don't you love me no more?"

The door remained resolutely shut. "I love…. _I love_ …. _Debra_ …." A few more choked sobs broke past Floyd's resistance. "…Debra… I'm so… _sorry_ …"

Wade leaned against the door, his eyebrows coming together in consternation. "…Well? Gosh, I GUESS she'd appreciate that, but, why's you still cryin? Debra ain't here, so what you got to be sorry for?"

As Floyd continued to cry louder now instead of offering any legitimate response, the idea solidly struck the side of Wade's skull with the irrevocable force of a nerf dart.

"…is… uh _… is Trevor in there_ with you, cousin?"

"NO! …Leave me alone!"

Now truly perplexed, the young man cast a wide glance around himself in curious wonderment. Besides Floyd, who sounded more like a drowning kitten from behind closed doors than a human, the apartment was empty. A few soft steps took him around the corner and into Debra's room, but as he pushed the door open the only things revealed to him were a pile of the Canadian's bloody clothes, and a large black dildo glimmering _wetly_ in the center of the bed. Involuntarily, Wade's asshole twitched, and he closed the door again with a thoughtless shrug.

Trevor was nowhere to be found.

 

\----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

They told him he had committed the sacrilegious deed with a gardening wire. A little sharp green spit of a thing coated in flexible enamel used for holding flower wreaths together. They said he had ripped it out of a flower display and wracked the sharp end across his throat. It was a dull piece of shit, so, _of course_ , it had done the approximate damage of being attacked by an indignant house cat. Trevor had been forced to get more creative with his methods, and had eventually wrapped the wire around his neck and pulled, until the shallow cuts ripped open into deeper gouges.

They said it was a miracle he had lived through the night… that the snow should have gently taken him away, cold and blood loss working in tandem to finish the grisly job he had started. They said that God must have been watching over him that night to keep him alive, where in fact, it had only been a cemetery gardener out with his wheel barrel for the morning routine. A preposterous thought, Trevor mulled. If God even existed in the first place, he certainly was no friend of his. Unless he was the kind of friend that liked pissing on a dead man. (a crime Trevor himself would later commit in subsequent years.) But Trevor was almost entirely certain that God was just a hypocritical piece of elaborate fiction created by the government of millennia past in order to try to guilt him into dishing his money out and fucking extramarital women. He could handle the fucking married women thing, but Trevor Philips would pay taxes when they pried his cash out of his cold dead hands. (Actually, he might just burn it first.)

The pathetic story went on only so far. Brad was in the cage, and so Trevor wrote to him with a brief, glossed-over version of the story. He received a small reply with distant condolences that sounded fake, but he didn't judge Brad too harshly for it, knowing how keenly he must also be mourning the loss of their friend. Ultimately the memory of the nightmare event survived with Trevor alone. (And _possibly_ with the haggard emergency room employees tasked with the horrifying chore of caring for a suicidal Canadian monster.) Time saw the stitches come out, and saw the scar fade away into nothing but a thin white line, like a piece of glimmering thread settled across his skin. But Trevor wouldn't, _couldn't_ , forget.

Forgetting wasn't an option. He didn't _want_ to forget. (…Ok, yes, he did. He really, desperately wanted to burn it all out from his memory.) But as he carried on, picking up odd jobs here and there, shifting from motel to motel and sitting alone on the end of a single bed in a double occupancy, he came to the conclusion that he needed to do something in order to move past what had happened. _Something_. Anything. Just…. Something.

The drugs and the sleeplessness and the gardening wire and the snow and Michael's hand warm on his shoulder all blurred together into a disconcerting residual nightmare that Trevor both longed for and despised beyond all comprehension. Had Mikey really been there with him? Had he heard Trevor's footsteps on the cold ground? Or was he dead like Ryan, utterly gone, nothing but leftover organic waste to be disposed of and forgotten about? The wire had been an impulse. A strange kind of messy accident. If Trevor had been so keen to kill himself, why had he then left his revolver under his pillow back at the motel? Why had he not carried a knife with him, at the very least? Maybe he had been afraid of showing Michael his weakest face. Or maybe his mother's voice reverberated too loudly in his head, screaming for him to just get it over with and let go. To just burn away and be done with it.

_\- - - CUT HERE - - -_

It was funny. A funny concept in a funny place. The week he received his first tattoo, Trevor kept chuckling as he caught glances of himself in store fronts, in car windows, in the bottoms of his coffee cups. It had some deeper meaning by that point, some joke too grand to fully comprehend, about the meaninglessness of living, and about the quality of his own person. But when his second tattoo came a few months later, a perfect cross a la momento mori with Michael's name written out in perfect script, it felt like it belonged. They meant the same thing, even if their shapes were different. And anyway, Trevor remembered that Michael had always loved old movies the best that featured both love and death.

Trevor's own words echoed back to him as he grazed a finger lightly across his throat. _'I'm not leaving you, Mikey!'_

Even if he had wanted to, he didn't.

 

\----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

 

Two shots of whiskey, a pint of beer, a bourbon on the rocks, and a tiny silver tin of sugared caramel peanuts sat between them on the table.

"…. _Mmmmmmichael_ ," Trevor rumbled the name out in a low breath, and it dripped with the tar of nine years worth of rumination and accusation. He leaned back against the booth and glared like a panther, both hands firmly stuck to the tabletop between them.

"Don't let yourself believe I think you're a _man of your word_ just because you bothered to show up here tonight. It's gonna take a _lot_ more than _that_ , cupcake."

Across the lacquered booth, Michael De Santa plucked one of the shot glasses out from where they were fenced in by Trevor's fists, and raised the glass in salute. Trevor picked his up a moment later in a perfect mirror.

"Here's to old friends!" The lines in the corners of Michael's eyes seemed to dig deeper as he clinked their glasses together once, before throwing the brown liquid back in a single thoughtless gulp. The empty glass hit the table again with a loud clack and the recently un-retired criminal immediately took his bourbon in hand.

Trevor let loose a long, slow whistle that cut out across the awkward space, and Michael swirled the ice in his glass. The silence settled pregnantly between them.

"So." Townley finally pronounced, the entry word stinking with a forced tone of friendliness. "What have ya been up to, T?"

What had he been up to? _WHAT had he been up to, Michael Townley asks_? Trevor wrapped an angry fist around his pint and took a heavy gulp. What was this? Some kind of cosmic joke, that's what. Fat fucking Michael Townley looking at him like he was some kind of exasperating relative that needed to be politely _tolerated_ until they would leave again. _What had he fucking been up to, he asks._

" _Well_ , Mikey, I'm something of an _entrepreneur_ now, see." Two could play at this stupid _nice-nice_ game. "Got my own tidy little business! Trevor Philips Enterprises! _Goooood_ name, right? Recently, I've been taking up some new territory… _expanding_ , as it were. I run it up in Sandy Shores with three extremely trustworthy associates. Associates who care DEEPLY about my personal, physical and _mental_ well being. Because they're my friends. Because they _aren't_ traitorous lying sycophants. You understand me, here? Because they aren't TURD EATERS, Michael."

Michael's hairline receded as his eyebrows shot up in surprise. The frown which followed after pulled the hairline back down again.

"Nice, T. Rrrrreeeaallll nice."

"Oh! _Oooooooh hoh hoh_ , no… I don't think so. Don't _'T'_ me, Michael, you don't _deserve_ it yet. You were ABSENT for _too long_ to use a pet name with me now." Fine. Trevor _couldn't play nice._

Oh sure, they'd been plenty nice yesterday. That is, if ' _nice_ ' by any stretch of the imagination actually implied not _immediately_ _committing arson_ to Michael's million dollar mansion. If that was a standard for 'nice', then Trevor Philips was a fucking Pope. They had even been _nice_ when they'd parted, after videotaping that useless hack Lazlow with his pants around his ankles. (Good riddance to bad rubbish, his perfect mother had always said. _About everything_.) But this was different. They were alone now, and without a destination. No rescue missions. No fists to bloody, no punishments to deal out. Not physically, anyway. Just… two men. Two… old…olllddd men. Two _old friends,_ really… out for a _friendly chat_ at the bar.

"So what, you telling me you sell toilet hooch now or somethin'?" Michael queried with a toss of his glass.

Trevor's eyes took on a livid gleam as he leaned forward and jabbed an accusatory finger at Michael from across the table.

"YOU don't know what you're talking about, _Mikey_. YOU have no _clue_ what I've been doing for these past nine years. NINE YEARS, Michael. Nine _years_ of living my fucking life thinking my best fucking friend was DEAD! …which, if you ever bothered to grow a human heart and pick up a copy of the manual for being a best friend, you would know is an _appallingly_ inhumane thing to do to a person."

"Inhumane?" Michael laughed. "Oh, that's rich, commin' from you…"

"It's _real_ , Michael. It's the fucking truth, okay? I tell the _truth_..! Something YOU MIGHT consider doing yourself a little bit from time to time. That is, if you're not too busy _deluding_ yourself into thinking you've somehow _got it made_ here in Lost Santos at long fucking last. Well, I've got some news for you, pal. You HAVEN'T."

Across the table, Michael's amusement burned slowly away in favor of a tense glare.

"—And you know what's really the kicker here, Mikey? You had it before. It doesn't matter how many fancy cars you drive, or what fucking vegetables you drink, or even how many throw rugs you own that are hand woven by whatever shit sack indigenous slave laborers. You're a prick! And I really _mean_ that, Michael, in all the best ways. I mean it as a COMPLIMENT. But you OWNED it back in Yankton! You had some fucking _dignity_. You were a prick that _did things_! You kicked ass! You took names! But NOW look at you! You're just a sad old fat retiree who cries next to a pool _nobody_ swims in while everybody ELSE gets fucked by half the neighborhood!"

"Yeah, it's pretty terrible living a _comfortable_ life. You jealous?"

"NOBODY is jealous of you, Michael. Not even rats."

"This is… Hey, no, this…" a cruel snort punctured the space between them as Michael leaned in a little closer. "—this isn't because I never _fucked_ you, is it?"

The reaction to the low blow was immediate, even if the reply wasn't. Trevor's blindsided reaction was obvious in the way his eyes filled first with shock, then hurt.

"…N…" The word ' _no_ ' stuttered half-formed, Trevor's tongue swelling like an allergic reaction. His ears heated as he looked away.

"…it IS, isn't it?"

"Look, you self-aggrandizing _fuck_ -"

"Fuckin' A, Trevor, it was twelve years ago!"

"Yeah, no SHIT, Mikey-"

"I mean Jesus Christ Almighty, I'm a married man now!"

"Yeah, and I can see how well _that's_ going—"

"—with two goddamn kids!"

"—I _KNOW_ , alright? You never _could_ stop fucking REMINDING me— I have eyeballs, Michael, _I can see them_."

Trevor's anger took a sour twist and he turned back to fully face Michael again, fingers gripping the edge of the booth in a deadly vice.

"I see _exactly_ what you'd like to call ' _a family_ '. Jimmy is so fucking _fat_ from terminal unemployment that I wouldn't be surprised to find out he's A DIABETIC IMPOTENT now, just like his fat fucking snake of a father. Tracey is a perfect angel trapped in a house where her negligent parents ignore her getting all her holes stuffed by some brainless masturbation-fiending talkshow host, and don't even get me _started_ on AMANDA'S TITS-"

Michael stood up suddenly and violently, Trevor's pint glass knocking over and spilling in an angry rush across the table. "DON'T YOU DARE TALK ABOUT MY WIFE'S TITS, YOU DRUG-ADDLED PIECE OF SHIT! I'VE WORKED WITH SOME REAL ASSHOLES IN MY DAY, BUT _YOU_ …"

Trevor swept a hand across the tabletop to scrape the liquid off the edge before it spilled over into his lap. He finished the gesture by flicking his hand at Michael. "Well EXCUSE ME for telling it like it is, Mr Michael _De Santa_! It's called _honesty_. You know, that little something called having a conscience you keep ignoring..? Or did you already _shit_ your FUCKING HEART OUT, down the goddamn TOILET just like a morning-after dump? You used to be something really special, M. _Really_ goddamn good, let me tell you-"

"—Jesus, here we go again." Michael waved a hand as he sat heavily back down with a thud, then folded his arms defensively across his chest.

"No, I mean it! You were legendary! You had it _all_ , sugar tits. The brains," he counted off on his fingers. "The brawn. _The buddy_. Really, the buddy. Remember that one. Budd _IES_ , too, if your unfeeling troll heart would bother to give Brad a second fucking thought, you amoral, grandstanding traitor. What about Brad? Eh? Have you even _thought_ of Brad? Did you even go to see him _once_ after he got sent to prison?"

Michael looked away, distinctly uncomfortable.

"Would you even _care_ if he got the needle? Or _released_?"

"Yeah well…" His eyes flicked back, unflinchingly settling on Trevor's. "He's not you."

A long awkward quiet filled in the space between them, Trevor's face blank in the unexpected void.

Then it was there again. The precious memory, like snowflakes settling against a glove, quiet between them. The warm recollection returned of young Michael's sweaty palm gripping his wrist over a police barrier, and Trevor's face twisted into something closer to nausea.

Across the table, Michael leveled Trevor with a look somewhere between nervousness and love. Trevor seemed not to notice it's pointed intensity, only that it existed in the first place. It only took a matter of moments before buckling under it's weight, and the leathery Canadian tore away his bloodshot gaze with a vulnerable huff.

"I need another beer." He muttered, and abruptly stood up and left the table.

Alone at last, the carefully crafted expression melted from Michael's face.

It was replaced with guilt.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi guys, sorry Ive been sitting on this chapter for so long! I got distracted by the fantastic squidnapped and working on our joint project, Desert of Providence. Either way, here is chapter four. I am sorry it is SO DARK. After finishing it I read it like 'damn, that is straight up a suicide chapter' so I hope I didn't make anybody vomit or burst into tears or whatever. Trevor is a putrid garbage truck of terrible feelings. BURN IT ALL TO THE GROUND


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